Black-White Achievement gap The difference between various demographic groups of students is commonly referred to as the “achievement gap.” Throughout the United States, an achievement gap between whites and black continue to persist at all levels of schooling, from elementary school to any higher education. Many of the reasons and solutions for minority underperformance remain uncertain. Parental involvement, family background, desegregation of schools, cultural capital and other factors produce a moderate decline in the achievement gap. However, more than half of the gap remains unexplained. Our society remain with a long history of racism, segregation and low expectations for African American children, and the public education system has not sufficiently responded to resolve this situation.
For example Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students do worst compared to Indians and Chinese who do best. White students are very close to the average but this is because they are the great majority of the school population .Among black and working class students, girls do better than boys, and among Asians boys do better than girls. Working class black girls do better than working class white girls. Many sociologists argue that ethnic differences in achievement can best be explained by looking at factors inside the school and outside the school. As Item A suggests ‘Afro-Caribbean boys were often expected to behave badly and they received a disproportionate amount of negative teacher attention’ that teachers have lower expectations of black boys.
As both slaves and African Americans were not encouraged to be educated, caucasian people would have been afraid that they would gain power through the power of knowledge and attempt to find a way to be equal to them. In A Lesson Before Dying, we are able to see this occur, which sets the premise for the main issue within the novel. Within the characters of the novel, the author Ernest J. Gaines gives the characters different positions on the value of formal education. Grant Wiggins is the local school teacher in his neighborhood within the novel. He starts off by working in a town with minumum wage and believes that he will be able to gain a better education and runs off to a university.
On the other hand, Gilbon recognises the processes committed in school which create the ethnic differences in attainment, he found that Afro-Caribbean boys were often labelled “unruly” “disrespectful”, they were also more likely to be given detentions than other pupils. This was because teachers misinterpreted their dress and manner of speech as a challenge to their authority. These actions lead these boys to have a self fulfilling prophecy which results in them
Assess sociological explanations for ethnic differences in achievement. (20 Marks) There are many reasons for ethnic differences in achievement, it’s been found that Indian and Asian pupils achieve higher than White, African-Caribbean, and Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils. One possible cause of ethnic differences in education is labeling, sociologist Gillborn found that teachers would label and therefore discipline black pupils quicker than other pupils which would do the same things and this would create a self fulfilling prophecy of the teachers thinking that black pupils would misbehave and do poorly and the pupils would accept that and with the extra lack of teacher help and increased discipline would therefore fail. Gillborn and Youdell think that this is because teachers label black pupils as being more likely to cause problems and rebel, with the teachers labeling the black pupils like this it makes them feel picked on and that the teachers underestimated them. Another result of the negative labeling of black pupils is the higher exclusion rate and the higher chances of black pupils to be put in sets below their actual abilities, which can only lead those black pupils to underachieve.
“Looking back” at one’s family experiences can provide perspective and distance; however as time passes and events are reframed, memory can distort the recall of events. A second limitation is the unknown influence of response and measurement bias. A third limitation is the lack of interview findings from a sample of low-achieving Black males. The generalizability of findings is a fourth limitation. Different types of combinations of factors may prove adaptive for Black youths growing up in different contexts (e.g., poverty; rural area, and at diferent points on the ability continuum.
When looking at the mandatory test scores of minority inner city students, specifically African American students, they are significantly lower than White American suburban students, hence the achievement gap. When the achievement gap is mentioned most people automatically think of the difference in grades, standardized-test scores, dropout rates, and college-completion rates between White Americans vs. African American students, but it goes much deeper than that. When determining the gap one must look at many other factors other than race, such as the child's economic status, where they live and the schools they attend, as well as how much parental involvement there is. When the achievement gap is mentioned the instant thought of White vs. Black students comes to mind. Black students scoring lower than White students, but this can be looked at from many different angles.
The main reason for his speech is to get people (mostly black parents) to act toward getting young black people to be more like the rest of the country in respect to education, language and motivation. When Dr. King spoke of a day when little black boys and girls could hold hands with and
Assess the view that differences in educational achievement between ethnic groups are primarily the result of discrimination in schools [20] In terms of educational achievement, there is evidence of inequalities among different ethnic groups. For example, Whites and Asians on average do better than Blacks. Some would say that this is primarily the result of discrimination in schools, an internal factor. However this is not the case as it is due to external factors such as the influence of home and family background and wider society. On the one hand it could be said that it is down to discrimination in schools that there is evidence of ethnic differences in educational achievement.
His family tried their best to mold him into a better man in order to survive the later years to come. Wright had to realize the harsh realities of the consequences of being a black man in the early 1900s. In that time, many blacks were tortured for the simple fact that they were not white. Black people experienced much violence. Jim Crow Laws promoted the idea that blacks were naturally mediocre to blacks in all important ways, including intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior.